Upside down in the concrete jungle

New York City is a place we already know before we arrive. It’s glittering skyline we’ve seen thousands of times in movies, TV shows and photographs.

We’ve heard and read countless stories in songs and books.

The New York of our imagination is a treasure trove of possibility, an endless procession of parties, bands, plays and subway acrobats.

Alongside the promise of opportunity are the tales of struggle and sacrifice, anxiety and sleeplessness.

The shine wears off a little in the mid-winter freeze, an uninsured visit to a drop-in clinic, or a bedbug outbreak in an apartment building. Yet, the shared belief among Kiwis who’ve made this city their home is that it’s a life worth leading if you can navigate its complexities.

I hear over and over, “If you can make it work in New York, you can make it work anywhere”.

In 1978, the theatre company Red Mole left Auckland for the United States, with dreams of artistic success. The founding members of the group, including my parents, had finished a tour of New Zealand and sought to expand the tour starting in New York, which they made their home for the next six years.

Thirty years later, I returned to my birth country, retracing my parents’ path to fill out the missing chapters of my story, seeking out the people and places that had inspired them.

I’ve been living here off and on since 2006, with brief stints in France, Australia and back home. I returned to New York semi-permanently last year.

I spent my first summer back taking nostalgic trips around the city, visiting neighborhoods, cafes and museums I had been missing in the three years I was away.

With visitors from New Zealand and Australia, I spent time becoming acquainted with dingy dive bars and illegal dance floors.

As autumn fell, and trees changed to red, orange and gold, I decided it was time to put down some roots of my own.

Making a life in New York is not easy and it’s this instability that draws together New Zealanders who’ve made the city their home.

“Having this support network is vital as we learn new jobs, find homes and adjust to this new culture,” says Renee Taylor, 29, who works at the New Zealand Permanent Mission to the United Nations.

There’s a NZ/NY Facebook page that keeps us connected. People post free room, apartment, sublet, job, and cultural listings.

It was through this Facebook page that I reconnected with Jenna Sauers, 28, who I had last seen at the New Zealand Young Playwright’s Competition 10 years earlier.

In 2008, escaping an unhappy modeling career, she became a regular contributor to the online women’s magazine Jezebel and has been working as a freelance writer ever since. We met up for the first time as adults at her Lindsey Lohan-themed Halloween party, she was blonde-wigged, “Marilyn Monroe” Lindsey and I was “underwear-as-outerwear, leggings-as-pants” Lindsey.

Jenna’s now studying creative writing at the University of Iowa but comes back to New York regularly. “There’s no art in Iowa,” she says to me on a visit to the MoMA PS1 art museum.

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Coming from a land with cities of one million or less, New York represents an extended social agenda; with enough variety no one could ever be bored. On a quiet weeknight, Q-Tip or Questlove spin records in Williamsburg. On a less quiet weeknight, you can see the entire crew from The Roots live at Terminal Five with a stream of surprise guests.

Andrew Keoghan, 33, a musician who moved here a year ago, was drawn to the accessibility and vastness of music in the city. “There’s this energy, this rhythm that’s everywhere. There are fireworks going off all around you.”

On the way to see a samba band on the Lower East Side, he says he was met with steel drums competing with the cacophony of grinding subway tracks is one of the ways living here has strengthened his songwriting.

A year in, Andrew is constructing a career in New York, having learnt the scope for musicians to act as a “gun for hire”, playing and producing projects for other musicians.

But the switch from social engagements to business meetings has not been an easy adjustment. New York is a city that requires constant self-promotion.

“The hustle doesn’t come naturally, at least not to me,” says Andrew.

The hustle doesn’t come naturally to me, either. As a performer, writer and poet, New York shrieks at me to pick something more substantive as a career.

Even having a job and doing artistic projects on the side is not as doable as back home. I often think about how easy it is to put on a theatre show in New Zealand. On an extended trip back to New Zealand, my friend Melody Nixon (who’s now also based in New York) and I decided to produce three short plays by young women.

We came up with the idea over a coffee on Cuba St in Wellington. We called on our friends for help, and two months later presented Currency. In New York, these things aren’t impossible, but they take much more time.

Being Māori in New York presents unique challenges to Hone Bailey, 29, whose previous work has been based around his community. He uses traditional Māori and Pasifika textile techniques to create clothing, which he’s been selling by word-of-mouth. Like many of us, he works side-jobs such as dancing with a Pacific Island troupe and ushering at Brooklyn Arts and Music.

“Obviously there aren’t a lot of jobs to do with Māori in New York,” he says, “but it’s also my CV, which is full of Te Reo. It doesn’t translate.”

The struggle of carving out a creative career here started to make a lot more sense when I met Chris Kraus, a writer and filmmaker who moved to New York the same year as my parents. They were contemporaries whose paths crossed on a number of projects.

Chris, who grew-up in NZ and the US, Knows first-hand the experience of the pieced-together life of an artist trying to find her way in New York. The second half of her film Gravity and Grace explores this very theme.

Sometimes I have to give myself a kick up the bum and say come on, you’re lucky to be here

One freezing day in February we sat at the back of a Ukrainian restaurant and filled our bellies with perogies and sour cream. When I told her how unstable life felt, she said, “I remember sitting at this exact table at your exact age and saying the exact same thing.”

“Remember, Chris Kraus felt like this at your age,” I remind myself while filling out applications for fringe festivals, writer’s residencies, grad schools and poetry seminars.

 “How do you stay here?” is a common question amongst the Kiwi community.

Andrew won the Green Card lottery. He recognises the luxury of his position as his friends struggle to make the switch from one-year graduate visas to three-year sponsorship visas. “Sometimes I have to give myself a kick up the bum and say come on, you’re lucky to be here,” he laughs.

Some, like Hone and I, are fortunate to be “AmeriKiwis”, possessors of the enviable dual-citizenship.

Other Kiwis, like Jeremy Owen, a scientist from Wellington, are able to get in because of their work.

Jeremy, who’s researching anti-cancer compounds found in bacteria, contacted a lab in New York that was doing work he admired, and with a recommendation from his boss in New Zealand, got a placement. “There aren’t any labs doing this kind of research in New Zealand, unfortunately.”

Though our motivations may not mirror each other’s, they are inextricably linked. We come in search of what Red Mole was chasing in 1978.

But the fear of giving up the adventure, wider audiences, expanded opportunities, new experiences of New York is felt, but is no greater than the feeling of disconnect being so far from home.

On hearing most Kiwis inhabit the North Brooklyn neighborhoods of East Williamsburg, Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, Hone’s reconsidering braving the infamous crosstown G train to travel there from his home in Park Slope.

 “This is the first time I’ve hung out with other Kiwis. I don’t know how I got through the last six months without them.”

 

Video:  Mhairi-Clare Fitzpatrick, Hone Bailey, Jonathan Thai, Jeremy Owen, Renee Taylor, Andrew Keoghan and Emma Anderson, share what they like about living in New York and what they miss about home. Produced by Sally Tran.

This content is brought to you with funding assistance from New Zealand On Air.